Before you press play on anything by Cecil Taylor, you need to adjust your expectations. If you're waiting for a melody to hold onto or a groove to settle into, you're going to have a rough time. His music asks you to listen differently — not for the tune, but for the texture, the pressure, the density of sound. Think of it less like a song and more like weather. There are patterns in there, but they move fast and they don't repeat the way you're used to.

Taylor came up in the 1950s with serious classical training behind him, and you can hear it — not in the sense that his music sounds like classical piano, but in the sense that he understood the full range of the instrument and had no interest in limiting himself to jazz conventions. His early records, like Unit Structures (1966) and Conquistador! (1966), were made when free jazz was still a fighting word, and they sound like someone kicking the door off its hinges. The ensembles he assembled were tight even when the music seemed to be flying apart — Jimmy Lyons on alto saxophone was with him for years and knew exactly how to move inside that chaos.

What Taylor actually does at the keyboard is hard to describe without resorting to physics. He plays with his palms, his forearms, his fists — not as a stunt, but because the music he hears requires that kind of force. The attacks are percussive, the sustain is used architecturally, and the density of notes in any given passage would be overwhelming from anyone else. But there's logic in it. Spend enough time with his records and you start to hear how ideas develop, how sections build and release, how the whole thing is structured even when it sounds most extreme. Live in the Black Forest (1978) is a good place to hear this — it's solo piano and it gives you time to follow one mind doing extraordinary things without anyone else in the way.

For most of the 1960s and into the 1970s, Taylor was genuinely broke. Clubs didn't want to book music that cleared rooms, and record labels weren't interested in artists audiences hadn't figured out yet. He taught, he took odd work, and he kept playing. The recognition, when it came — grants, festival bookings, academic attention — was real, and he handled it without softening anything about his music. The later records are just as uncompromising as the early ones. He was never performing difficulty for its own sake; this was simply how he heard music.

If you're new to Taylor, don't start with the longest or most demanding record. Try Silent Tongues (1975), his solo set recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival — it has room to breathe and it's a good introduction to how he shapes a performance over time. From there you can go deeper: the unit recordings, the collaborations with Archie Shepp or Max Roach, the late-career duo work. The music rewards patience more than most jazz does, and once it clicks, it genuinely sounds like nothing else in the piano's history.